Although Paul Muldoon is best known as 'one of the most inventive and ambitious poets writing today' (Times Literary Supplement), he has also written Monkeys, a BBC television play about the entrapment of John Delorean, and Shining Brow, a libretto for Daron Aric Hagen's opera about Frank Lloyd Wright, which was described by The London Review of Books as 'displaying both an exemplary dramatic clarity and an endless aptitude for word-play and humorous equivocation'.

This verse play, his first for the state, centers on a safe house and a lookout post on the Irish border where six members of an IRA cell, along with the redoubtable Kate McInerney, are trying to make sense of recent developments.